Faith

Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and others have been branded the "new atheists" by the religious side.  These new atheists are directly challenging religion's place in our thinking and their established position in our society as well as our acceptance of their claims.

The new atheists assertion is that religion rely on faith from their followers to accept what religion teaches them.  To the atheists,  faith is defined as "belief without evidence" whereas the scientific approach is always evidence based and science is always ready to update its thinking when new evidence differs with the current scientific theory.

I was recently given a book written by John Lennox who argues from the religious side against the new atheists. Lennox even quoted Mark Twain saying that "Faith is believing what you know ain't true".

However, through Lennox, I can see the religious argument that we all need faith. 

Lennox argues that science's so call evidence based approach rely on one fundamental assumption that there is order in this world and that the world as we experienced today and before will continue to behave as it has in the past. 

While the sun seems to rise every morning in our experience, there is actually no proof or basis to claim that it will continue to do so tomorrow.  Therefore we, and indeed, even scientists, are relying on faith that the sun will rise tomorrow. They can repeat their experiments to confirm their theories but there is no guarantee that the next time they perform the experiment, it will give the same results.

From a completely different source, Nassim Taleb, the author of "The Black Swan" and predictor of the 2008 financial crisis, talked about not being able to confirm a theory by doing more experiments.  We can look at any number of white swans and not conclusively say that all swans are white.  But one sighting of a black swan will dispute the white swan theory.

Similarly, Taleb talked about what we can learn from the turkey:

"Consider a turkey that is fed every day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by friendly members of the human race.......On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanks giving, something unexpected will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief."

(I understand that Taleb got this from Bertrand Russell who used a chicken for his example.)

This is typically the problem of knowledge by induction.  There may be traps that we do not yet know until we come up to it.

Therefore Lennox concluded that even the atheists need faith to carry on with their lives.  They are just denying this as we all take for granted the faith of expecting the earth to go on as it always had.

I can see Lennox's point.

However, we do have to recognize that we do not strap ourselves down to our beds every night in case we somehow lose gravity while we sleep and we ended up flying off our beds.

Between the black and white of having or not having faith, there is the gray area of conducting our life based on the probable.

Having faith that gravity will exert itself in the next second seems to me a much better bet than expecting the water to turn into wine in the next second or have manna dropping from heaven. 

Life is not about black and white but more the weighing of the probabilities.

Besides, we tend to give science a bad name for revising what they claim previous.  It is important to realise that science have not actually changed anything in terms of how things are but only in how we understanding of it.  Our understanding is constantly being updated as we know more.

It is like getting closer and closer to a destination when we travel, we get more and more detail.  What seemed like a dessert from afar may actually have lush oasis as we get closer.

It almost seem to me that we need two different words for faith.  One for expecting things to continue as the scientist and atheists assume and a different word for believing in miracles and other rare or nonexistent happenings. 

The atheists claim from David Hume is that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof or evidence" before one can believe the eye witness or the messenger still stands for me.